Antwerp, Belgium
Take the application on your computer that you’re most familiar with. Now imagine its creators opening up the product roadmap to 100 randomly selected users. They would build every feature request, idea, and redesign these people would come up with for half a year. Do you think you would still use that tool in two years time?
Read More
There is this line of thought that has been bugging me for a while now: “With the coming of LLMs we don’t need juniors anymore”. The idea is that all the boring work (boilerplate, etc.) can be handled by LLMs, and we can now just focus on the real work.
As you’ve probably heard a million times by now, the counterargument to not hiring juniors is the question of succession. Who will be your future seniors? When I’ve asked that question before, I often hear company leaders say that they aren’t in the business of education and that schools should reassess how they bring young people into the job market.
Read More
The market is in a weird place right now, a lot of companies are making record profits, but at the same time every other company seems to think bankruptcy is around the corner.
Both of these camps seem to use the same general strategy: cut costs and maximize profits. What mainly comes down to: getting more money.
Read More
I have the feeling that every organization out there is, at least partially, focusing on process optimization, something that often happens when the market is down. These days there is also the AI angle to the entire thing, and the unrealistic expectations that follow it.
To come fully prepared for this, I’ve decided to re-read two absolute classics in this space: The Toyota way & The Goal 1. I’ve read both of these books in college, but re-reading them made me realize that a lot of these process optimization exercises are too simplistic in nature, and often misunderstand what to focus on.
Read More
Last post I wrote about how you can approach buy in for your architecture. I’ve been thinking a lot more about the topic, and would like to delve a bit deeper into it.
I still stand fully behind the post I wrote two weeks ago, but the more I think (and research) about it, the ideal situation is that you don’t have to seek buy in for your architecture at all.
Read More
I recently read the quote, ‘The best architecture that isn’t implemented is just an expensive drawing,’ and I couldn’t agree more. I wish I came up with it.
When organisations hire for architecture roles they always look for extremely technical and knowledgeable people. While it is true that you need deep technical knowledge to set up large-scale architecture outlines, it’s all worthless if you can’t convince people to actually implement it.
Read More
Two weeks ago I wrote an article about governance and documentation on an organisational scale. This is the follow-up post that focuses on the project scale. You could just read this post, but it’s probably better that you start with the previous one first
The biggest problem with documentation is that nobody just sits down to write it all out. And I also think that’s the wrong way to go about it. You can’t just give someone the task of ‘starting to write whatever needs to be written’. You will never cover the important parts.
Read More
If you’ve known me for long enough, there will be a point where I’m going to pitch you the concept of Obsidian. I adore that program1, I basically live my life in it. Everything is connected, and ideas just bubble up on their own.
That love for Obsidian is always amplified when I have to look up something on an organisational documentation platform. I can never find anything, it’s always out of date, and it has conflicting ideas all over the place. I’m pretty sure you can relate (if you even have one).
Read More
I first learned of systems thinking in the domain of city planning, and that is apparently also where the idea comes from. It was described to me in the context of building new residential buildings and effects on local bird populations.
Birds don’t always perceive glass clearly, especially when it’s a tall apartment building and on their flight path. So there are birds that think they can pass under an arch, yet instead fly straight into a glass wall.
Read More
Some years ago I worked with a scale-up that was really focused on the way they handled data in their product. They extensively argued over data language, had value objects everywhere, explicit models and, even hexagonal architecture.
It was a cool place to work, with a lot of smart people.
At some point they started to talk about standardizing their data transfer objects, the data that flows over the API connections, in these common models. The idea was that there would be a single Invoice, User, Customer concept that they can document, standardize and share over their entire application landscape.
Read More